As noted in City Journal, support for capital punishment is overwhelmingly high … which is why politicians and wealthy progressives whole-heartedly oppose it. As you probably know, a “luxury belief” is one that is usually held by people who will not be in any way impacted by the downstream effects of that belief. It’s not the wealthy and privileged who suffer when murderers get out of prison, so they are generally all in favour of ever greater leniency in sentencing and easing parole conditions. Poor and middle class people are more likely to suffer when violent criminals return to their communities, which is why they generally want longer incarceration for violent crimes and favour capital punishment for certain abhorrent acts of murder. Charles Fain Lehman has more:
Those findings undermine the narrative, routinely advanced by death-penalty abolitionists, that capital punishment is on the decline because the public has turned against it. In reality, both public opinion and the current composition of the Supreme Court militate in favor of expanding the death penalty’s use — and, specifically, relaxing many of the arbitrary and undemocratic restrictions imposed on it by courts over the past several decades.
Abolitionists have based their case for declining public support on polls such as Gallup’s, which for nearly a century has asked respondents if they are “in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder”. The share in favor has indeed dropped steadily since the 1990s, from a 64-point difference between support and opposition to just a 6-point split today.
That question, though, artificially reduces support by asking about all murders. Under current precedent, only certain heinous murders — those in which jury-determined aggravating factors outweigh mitigating factors — are eligible for the death penalty. There is likely far more support, for example, for executing Dylann Roof specifically than there is for executing all murderers generally.
The new MI poll illuminates this point. It asks about support for capital punishment under a variety of circumstances. The result is lopsided endorsement in the event of, for example, murder involving “extreme cruelty”, mass murder, or the murder of a child — all supported by 3-to-1 margins. Death for premeditated murder generically has 72 percent support, suggesting that even clarifying intent significantly increases support for capital punishment.
Notably, the poll also finds majority support for executing those who rape a child (71 percent) or an adult (57 percent). Yet neither offense would, absent a concurrent murder, be death-eligible. The Supreme Court ruled that applying the death penalty to non-murdering rapists violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment” in 1977’s Coker v. Georgia, a prohibition it extended even to child rapists in a 2008’s Kennedy v. Louisiana. With certain exceptions for crimes against the state, the Kennedy majority asserted, a crime that did not result in the taking of someone’s life was categorically ineligible for the death penalty.
Both decisions were justified by reference to the court’s “evolving standards of decency” test. First introduced in 1958’s Trop v. Dulles, the test has led the court to understand “cruel and unusual punishment” through its interpretation of “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society”. That lens allowed it to reach the conclusions it did in Coker, Kennedy, and numerous other narrowings of the use of the death penalty. In combination with the aggressiveness and gamesmanship of the capital defense bar — which spends decades filing often-frivolous procedural motions to keep clearly guilty clients alive — the result has been a steady choking off of capital punishment.
Update, 31 July: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
[…] APPARENTLY A LOT OF US ARE REALIZING LIBERALISM IS THE LUXURY: Support for capital punishment is the opposite of a luxury belief. […]
Pingback by Instapundit » Blog Archive » APPARENTLY A LOT OF US ARE REALIZING LIBERALISM IS THE LUXURY: Support for capital punishment is — July 31, 2026 @ 01:00
All those who commit the crimes listed deserve to die. Nevertheless, I oppose the death penalty. Why? Because some fraction, however small, of those on death row will have been wrongfully convicted. I would rather the guilty live in prison than the innocent get killed. We can’t make it up to them later. You may say it’s a very small number. True, but what if you’re the one? Whould you still support the death penalty?
What about the rape of a child? Usually the child victim is also the only witness. If the penalty for the rape is death, then the rapist might as well kill the only witness. The rapist has a better chance of getting away with it. After all, the penalty for the murder is no greater than the penalty for the rape. In for a penny, in for a pound. Do we really want to go there? I would rather my raped daughter were returned to me than be murdered to prevent her testimony. What if I caught the rapist in the act? That’s different. That’s not our legal system. It’s personal. I would use any means at hand to kill the perpetrator. Even after the fact, I might try to get revenge, but, again, that’s personal. Same goes for some of the other crimes listed.
Comment by Lewin W. Wickes — July 31, 2026 @ 09:16
I would have to disagree with one thing: at this point, I don’t think the elites beliefs against the death penalty are “luxury beliefs”. At this point, I am strongly inclined to believe it’s a necessary consequence of their belief that “society” is the cause of crime. Hence, the desire to release all criminals, and if they steal from, rape, or kill peaceable people, so what? Society deserved it.
And it goes both ways: if a peaceable person is dragged into court, the book and everything else at hand should be thrown at him.
These people don’t reject the death penalty because they are sheltered and protected. They are sheltered and protected because they believe they deserve it — they are the elites trying to fix society — and thus they deserve protection from both evil socienty and the criminals who are punishing society for their imaginary ills.
And in the end, if elites get complete power, the criminals and the insane they have been releasing all this time become their police, because they have no conscience, and will happily punish society with gulags and mass graves.
Comment by Alpheus — July 31, 2026 @ 14:48
Rob Henderson on the topic of capital punishment, 4 August:
Comment by Nicholas — August 5, 2026 @ 17:29